Although I am Texas-born and have the passport to prove it, these days I’m just a visitor in these parts.

My day job is helping edit the Washington Business Journal, a sister paper of the Dallas Business Journal. For a few weeks this fall, though, I have the privilege of writing for this paper and interacting with Dallas’ remarkable business community, particularly its booming Hispanic business community.

Ironically, I had to come to Dallas to meet one of my own community’s most successful Hispanic entrepreneurs.

At the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s annual convention last week at the Hilton Anatole, I chased down Tony Jimenez, who had just picked up a trophy for turning his Vienna, Va.-based MicroTech into the single fastest-growing Hispanic-owned business in the nation for the second year in a row. The 500-or-so-person company has made a killing off of contracts to integrate federal agencies’ IT systems, including weaving together the IT infrastructure for the Obama campaign’s transition team.

Did I know all of this before I interviewed him? To be honest, no.

Jimenez didn’t hesitate to tell me he sees a problem with that. “If I were robbing banks, I’d be on the front page,” Jimenez said, with more of a Texas twang than a Latino lilt. “If we’re successful, let’s get the trumpets out.”

A little earlier in the convention, Jimenez met your unabashedly pro-business governor, Rick Perry, who was similarly surprised he hadn’t heard of MicroTech. To hear Jimenez tell it, Perry told him, “If you were in our state, we’d be talking about it everywhere we went.”

Shaking his head, Jimenez told me: “I created 700 jobs in Virginia, yet I got more recognition from the governor of Maryland than I got from Virginia.”

I didn’t get Jimenez’s point at first — I’m just not really big on “talk.” Results speak louder than promotional materials, in my book. Hispanic-owned businesses are one of the fastest-growing segments of the economy, and the Washington region is seeing its fair share of that growth.

Eleven out of the 500 largest Hispanic-owned businesses are located in Fairfax County, Va., thanks in part to federal contracting opportunities, while 12 are based in Dallas. So why should people in my region care about your governor’s relative eagerness to brag about his Hispanic businesses? Aren’t access to capital and contracting opportunities more important?

I posed that question to an economic development officer. Capital and contracts are important, but there’s a third ingredient for Hispanic-owned businesses. They will only get those first two opportunities when they’re “recognized as valid businesspeople with something to offer,” he said. “There’s an ‘image enhancement’ that needs to take place.”

As fellow light-skinned Latinos, Jimenez and I both know what the Fairfax official means by that. “If you blend in, you hear the comments about immigrants,” Jimenez said. “People have a very tainted view of what Hispanics are, and they forget about the contributions we make with jobs, inventions and solutions.”

To get past the bias, Jimenez and other Latino business leaders say, elected officials need to help pull the narrative beyond the immigration debate. Sure, Texas has its own anti-immigrant flare-ups, but you don’t get the sense here that Texans want to chase Latinos out of the state. (Of course, that would be hard, since we make up more than a third of your population.) In parts of Virginia, though, that’s precisely the attitude.

None of this is to say that Virginia isn’t just as “open for business” as Perry proudly proclaims Texas to be — and that includes Hispanic business. But Jimenez and others say Virginia needs to do a better job of touting its successful Hispanic businesses in order to attract and breed more such businesses.

According to one Texas legislator I spoke to, Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, when Spain’s second-largest bank, BBVA Group, was looking for a place to leap from Mexico into the states, not only did it see a favorable business climate in Texas, it saw a “cultural affinity,” a region that gets them, where Spanish language and culture are embraced. BBVA Compass is now the fourth-largest bank in Texas.

That attitude — along with your public- and private-sector supplier-diversity initiatives, small business forums, trade missions and cross-border Mexican business incubators — positions D-FW to continue capitalizing on the torrid growth of the Hispanic business community. That’s something to be proud of, right up there with those dang Dallas Cowboys.

As another Washington-area Hispanic business leader put it to me: “What Virginia, Maryland and D.C. should be doing is learning about the Texas, California and New Mexico experiences, and learning how they can do better.”

Melissa Castro is a visiting journalist from the Washington Business Journal and can be reached at mcastro@bizjournals.com.

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